Further Reading
- Ball, L. J. and A. V. Thompson, Eds. (2018). Routledge International Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning. Abingdon, UK, Routledge.
This edited book, written by experts in their disciplines, covers all aspects of the psychology of thinking. Its 35 chapters cover both classic findings and the latest research developments.
- Gobet, F. (2016). Understanding Expertise: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach. London, Palgrave.
This book addresses expertise from a number of disciplines, with a focus on psychology. Of particular interest will be the chapters on problem solving, decision making, intuition, insight and creativity. The issue of rationality is also discussed, both from the point of view of psychology and philosophy.
- Newell, B. R., Lagnado, D. A., & Shanks, D. R. (2015). Straight Choices: The Psychology of Decision Making. London, Psychology Press.
This advanced introduction to the psychology of judgment and decision making encompasses both the foundations of the field and state-of-the-art developments. An interesting feature of the book is that it discusses the relationship between decision making and learning.
- Manktelow, K. I., Over, D. E. and Elqayam, S. (Eds.) (2011). The Science of Reason: A Festschrift in Honour of Jonathan St. B. T. Evans. Hove: Psychology Press.
This edited book includes chapters by experts in the field of reasoning, covering probabilistic and causal reasoning, dual-process theories and the nature of human rationality. The volume is in tribute to Jonathan St. B. T. Evans.
Glossary
Availability heuristic Making judgements on the basis of how available relevant examples are in our memory store.
Deductive reasoning task A problem that has a well-defined structure in a system of formal logic where the conclusion is certain.
Functional fixedness The inability to use an object appropriately in a given situation because of prior experience of using the object in a different way.
Heuristics Methods or strategies which often lead to problem solution but are not guaranteed to succeed.
Inductive reasoning task A problem that has a well-defined structure in a system of formal logic where the conclusion is highly probable but not necessarily true.
Insight The reorganising or restructuring of the elements of the problem situation in such a way as to provide a solution. Also known as productive thinking.
Means–ends analysis A general heuristic where a sub-problem is selected that will reduce the difference between the current state and the goal state.
Pragmatic reasoning schemata Clusters of rules that are highly generalised and abstracted but defined with respect to different types of relationships and goals.
Problem space A term introduced by Newell and Simon to describe the first stage in problem-solving; represented in the problem space are the initial state, the goal state, the instructions, the constraints on the problem and all relevant information retrieved from long-term memory
Representativeness heuristic Making judgements on the basis of the extent to which the salient features of an object or person are representative of the features thought to be characteristic of some category.
Summary
- The main subfields of the psychology of thinking are problem solving, expertise, creativity, analogy making, reasoning and decision making.
- Behaviourists proposed that problem solving can be explained by learning stimulus-response links. Gestalt psychologists devised clever experiments, but their theoretical explanations were vague.
- Problem space theory proposed that problem solving consists of search within a problem space. It has received support from both experiments and computer simulations. The theory has also been successfully applied to the subfields of expertise and creativity.
- Some authors have proposed that analogy making is at the heart of thinking, but experiments have shown that people struggle when trying to use analogies.
- Research into deductive reasoning compares the way people reason with solutions obtained by the application of logic, which offers a normative theory. People commit many errors when faced with reasoning problems. With inductive reasoning, people suffer from confirmation bias.
- Expected utility theory offers a normative theory of decision making under uncertainty. Humans’ decisions do not follow the predictions of this theory, in part because they use heuristics that sometimes lead to systematic biases.
- Dual-process theories have been developed to explain the empirical results in most subfields of thinking. These theories postulate the existence of two systems: System 1 is fast and intuitive whilst System 2 is slow and deliberative.
- Research on thinking has been dominated by the question of rationality. In general, the data do not support the hypothesis of full rationality. Rather, they support the hypothesis of bounded rationality. Due to the limits of attention and working memory, biases affecting retrieval from long-term memory, and the difficulty of searching large problem spaces, humans are satisficers rather than optimisers, and choose solutions that are good enough rather than optimal.
Multiple Choice Questions